I live in the Midwest – Northern IN/IL area to be exact.  Early January is usually a time for snow.  Here are a few pictures of the snow we got on New Years Eve.  Typical of this area.

But a week later, mother nature had other plans.   A member of my storm chasing team, Tony, started to warn me of a possible storm system and to ready the storm chasing equipment.  Honestly, I didn’t give that statement much weight because it was January.  He said it will happen on January 7.  Even that morning, I checked SPC‘s daily forecast, this is what it was:

It wasn’t very encouraging.  It seemed that the NWS wasn’t prepared for a winter severe weather event.   Later that day, the SPC did issue a Slight Risk, but that was far too south for us to reach.  It wasn’t until their afternoon outlook that they iussued a wide-spread Slight Risk.

That was good enough for me.  We hit the road shortly after that outlook was published.  It took me so long to write up a post about it, so I don’t remember that much about it.  What I do remember was that it was like Spring.  It was well in the 60s and humid.  The funniest thing was that we still saw snow in some of the ditches and Christmas decorations on some houses…and we were chasing storms.  When we got to our destination, it was already starting to get dark (remember, It’s January), so the pictures weren’t very impressive.  We did not see any tornadoes, just the usual wall clouds.  It turned out that 75 tornadoes touched down before the day was over.  Kudos to Tony that predicted it way ahead of the SPC, and if this is a sign of things to come this Spring, hold on your your hats.

The first of the two time-lapse videos were at around 3:40pm – right about when the local middle schools were letting out. Needless to say, they all got home late. This storm was responsible for knocking out the power until the next afternoon.

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The second video was later that night around 7pm or so, and the camera had a harder time focusing. I wasn’t able to get the top of this storm in the frame, but you could see all the way up the side of the storm making it like a huge wall coming.

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Below are some pics. Keep in mind that some are poor quality because of darkness and the clouds are beyond the flash’s recommended distance of 6ft .

8-23 Time Lapse Footage (ZIP)

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This video was from our last chase up around the Rockford, IL on June 7, 2007. We were hoping this storm was going to produce something, but it never did. This was the first time we did a time lapse video, so yes, that is us in the shot forgetting that the camera is still rolling. The was the first storm we tracked down. We deployed at a wonderful place with a great view for miles. As you can see in the video, we were able to watch that storm for quite some time.

After that storm passed, we dropped a few miles south because the next storm was going to cross over right over us if we didn’t move. We saw a wall cloud similar to the one in the footage, but it didn’t look that impressive, so we didn’t film it. We were sitting in the car when we realized it was still going to pass overhead even though we thought we were out of the way. Still this second storm didn’t seem that threatening so we stayed. We only got a few bursts of rain and possibly a funnel cloud out of that one.

I also added a second video that is a little slower, and thus, longer.

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